Study Abroad in Bologna

August 22th, 2008

I am so honored to have won the "Transitions Abroad" student travel writing contest for 2008. I've been reading "T.A." for over ten years, from back when it was still a print magazine. Creative Journaling is a part of my daily life and, now that I see my travel experience in Italy can be of some benefit to others, I have decided to continue sharing my adventures studying abroad in Italy via this blog which is a reverse timeline of my experiences and reflections since last summer 2007. The "T.A." article is entitled "Slowing Down and Discovering The Good Life in Italy" and is available at the following link: Transitions Abroad Article

Read for a full description of how to obtain a U.S. Foreign Language Area Studies grant (FLAS) for study abroad. In my case, I discuss Europe and Italy specifically but the FLAS is available for study in almost every region of the world. I also explain how to make the most of your time abroad whether you're studying or just trying out a new experience.
Read more!

Finding Hidden Dining Treasures Outside Bologna and Ferrara

June 30th, 2008

As I sit on the balcony of my little Bologna apartment and look across to a sunny green courtyard while swirling and sipping a glass of velvety Pinot Noir from the Alto-Adige, I can't help but think fondly of my dear friends Nadia and Paolo, Bolognese born and bred, who gave me this wine as a gift. I met Nadia at the gym, or at least the Italian version of one, which is really more of an exercise studio with no equipment. When she learned I am an American university student on an exchange she suggested my giving her private ESL lessons twice a week because she and her husband Paolo travel outside of Italy often and English comes in handy. Our lessons, long informal conversations that include as much Italian as they do English and as much gossip as they do grammar, often turn to food and Nadia's profound love of sweets that rivals even my own -- and so our friendship began.

One day while having our class over coffee in a local café, Paolo called to see if we would like to take a drive that evening to have dinner out of town. I'm always up for an adventure but had no idea of the kind of delights they were about to introduce me to. I had heard that the best food in Italy could be found in the country at restaurants and inns sometimes referred to as agriturismo, and had discovered myself that by eating outside the city the food was fresher and more authentic, yet I had never eaten at any of the gastronomic "institutions" that the region of Emilia-Romagna is famous for. Merely mentioning the name of certain restaurants sends mouths around here gaping and La Rosa is no exception. I was about to get a taste of history.

La Rosa is located just outside of Ferrara in Sant'Agostino, an agricultural area of Emilia. This year the restaurant is celebrating 100 years in business and has been producing authentic regional cuisine from its kitchen for three generations. Everything is made from scratch, right down to the hot-out-of-the-oven bread and the grissini bread sticks. The wine selection is splendid and we started with a bottle of Prosecco to accompany appetizers of savory potato cream with crunchy cod (10 euros). For the first dish I had trenette pasta with asparagus ragu (10 euros), and for the secondo tender veal cutlet with a delicate truffle sauce (market price), all accompanied by a bottle of dry and fruity Cabernet produced in the hills of Bologna nearby. "Mamma mia," I said to a chorus of approving nods at my selection as the veal all but melted in my mouth.

We were one of three tables seated that Wednesday evening. Clearly a restaurant like La Rosa is not concerned about racking up covers; its priority is service and instructing a patient culture of superior cuisine. This is Italian dining at its finest. The owner, who my friends know well, chatted with us throughout the three-hour meal in his animated Ferrarese accent about his family and their latest project, a quaint yet contemporarily designed inn situated on the property. La Locanda, as they call it, has five stylish rooms and an indoor fountain with a reflection pool (80 euros a night with breakfast). The idea was to attract tourists and business people stopping in Ferrara for a day or two, as well as to provide overnight services for diners who have driven from afar and want to stay and have yet another glass of wine, rather than driving home late. It seems that the new Italian law allowing authorities to reposses your car and sell it to the highest bidder if you surpass the designated maximum alcohol intake has been good for business. Regardless, we drove home feeling jolly but relatively clear-headed and minding the speed limit.


In the following months Paolo and Nadia invited me to dine at La Capanna di Eraclio in Codigoro by the Po river delta and Buriani in Pieve di Cento, both of which are within a thirty minute drive from Bologna toward Ferrara and in relatively isolated areas whereby if you didn't already know they existed you would never find them merely passing. At Buriani I noticed immediately that they featured the Slow Food logo on their menu. Slow Food is a world-wide phenomena now, initiated twenty years ago by Carlo Petrini from Piemonte to help raise awareness about local food traditions and to promote attentiveness to how food is cultivated and prepared. However, In Italy not every restaurant that serves such truly artisanal cuisine has adopted the logo.

For instance, at La Capanna the baby cuttlefish I ate, accompanied by a delicate black sauce made from their own viscera were hand selected that morning from a small bay near Venezia, and the pasta and integral bread were all homemade on the premises, definitely qualifying for Slow Food in my book. Buriani, a lovely white-table cloth establishment with large cottage windows, offered equally choice ingredients. I started with some squill shrimp stuffed ravioli with zucchini shavings (16 euros) and followed with a platter of five meaty lamb chops, perhaps the tenderest I've ever eaten, with a fresh and subtle mint pesto sauce accompanied by a small Mediterranean feta and olive salad (18 euros). For desert I had molded squares of creamed chocolate tarts surrounded by chipped mojito ice and baby mint leaves (10 euros). I will never forget the pleasure on my friends' faces as they watched me eat with gusto during our evenings out together. They chuckled with the knowledge that they were presenting this American girl with a great gift by sharing all their food-lovers’ secrets they had acquired over the years. The next day via Skype I told my mother in the States the mouth-watering details about all that I devoured at Buriani and she said to me in a teasingly dramatic tone, "Oh, that's too bad. I'm really sorry to hear you are suffering so much during your year in Italy and that you are being forced to eat some of the most superb food in the world. What a shame!"

I have pondered at length on Buriani’s mixed seafood carpaccio of umbrine and scampi, the crisp bubbly wine for starters, and the crimson sunsets we witnessed from above the lush cultivated plains where we journeyed, and what all these restaurants have in common is the word scoperta. Scoperta means a find. Whenever Nadia and Paolo invite me for dinner, this word comes up. Would I be interested in going to eat with them in some place that I could discover as if stumbling fortuitously upon hidden treasure? Yes! And they are treasures, each one family run with women in the kitchen, an interesting phenomena particular to eating in the country since the world's famous big city chefs are mostly men. And everything is of the optimum freshness. That is what I will miss most of all when I return to the States. Eating well in Italy means you know that the pasta wasn't pre-cooked, the meat wasn't sitting on a hotplate, and the bread isn't stale – not to say that it’s impossible to have a bad meal at some tourist trap in Italy, but I was under no risk of that on these occasions. In addition, each of these restaurants artfully combined the fundamental ingredients of traditional Italian cuisine with a presentation and dining experience that was completely modern and relaxed. At La Capanna, however, a little more of the old-school charmingly held on. When handed the menu I immediately noticed there were no prices. Later on the way home in the car I cautiously asked, "How do you know how much things cost if there are no prices? Isn't that intimidating?" They just winked at me and said, "but there were prices, just not on the ladies' menus." How nice.


Places to visit along the way: L'Abbazia di Pomposa, Ferrara, Cento
Read more!

La Casalinga

May 19th, 2008

After living in Bologna for almost a year now, I have many new friends. Some of these I am certain to stay in touch with forever; some I know will naturally drift away with the seasons as our lives take different directions when I return home. Yet they will all remain present in the annals of my memory. As will those whom I’ve seen on a daily basis but know little about, or have never even actually met. These familiar strangers include the chubby butcher who joyfully greets every pretty lady passing his counter with “Buon Giorno, Signorina,” or the young woman at the tobacco shop who unenthusiastically sells me my scratch-off lotto tickets, and with a similarly lifeless comportment pays me when I win. In this category of mysterious familiars the one I will remember most is the old lady who lives across the courtyard from me.

It’s eight a.m.. It could be Sunday, it could be Tuesday. No matter. For her everyday begins the same way. First, the exterior metal blinds called taparelle are drawn up. Then the windows are opened with a full thrust regardless of the time of year. I see her. She is peaking out with her pale doughy face to see who is in the courtyard, who is out on one of a hundred balconies attached to one of five condos that line our common courtyard. She looks to see who might be looking at her. Sometimes she spots me drinking coffee from my balcony. Sometimes I peer out from the shadows of my kitchen where I am still invisible to her. I admit it: I am fascinated by this woman and her tireless routine.

If it’s not raining she immediately wipes off the window ledge. Then come the bedsheets. She drapes them out the window where air blows through electric-white fabric. So come the pillows, also white, placed side by side atop the ledge. Beating and shaking, she punishes the inner feathers into fluffiness. Looking out into the courtyard again she scans the scene to see if anything has changed, if anyone new is coming or going in a car, on a bike. But mostly she stops to puff. By this I mean that every movement requires extreme effort. This little hunched-over woman with her colorless pageboy cut and her pallid skin that has never seen a ray of sun, who couldn’t be taller than four feet ten inches, has the willpower of a giant. All the while huffing and puffing till her cheeks blow up like a guppy she shifts linens from off her bed to the window ledge where they dangle and sway until they are tamed by the breeze into freshness. All this she does without expression. Even her bent over body moves with slow wooden turns from side to side. The puffing cheeks and lips never betray what she might be thinking for every movement is one of endless years of household duty.

She is gone for a moment only to reappear from inside the bathroom window. Her skin, hair, and colorless housedress blend in with the neutral tile walls. All I see clearly now are dark black eyes looking out, eyes that remind me of a doe’s eyes nervously scanning the forest to detect enemies. Then come the bottles of detergent, one by one. A small stiff hand moves in and out of view placing cleaning product after cleaning product on the ledge of the bathroom window. There are somewhere between four and five brightly colored plastic containers perfectly lined up before she starts to bend and scrub. She lifts a bathmat out the window and brushes it clean, then brushes the brush clean with another smaller brush. And so it goes, an endless cycle of polishing and sanitizing everything that has been touched and used throughout the previous day. This same activity is repeated each morning with the puffing and the stooping and the black eyes looking out to see what others above and below are doing, all while her equally pale husband sits on a chair and smokes absently sometimes observing her, sometimes not.

Meanwhile, as it is across the courtyard, so it is above. Paola, another older woman with a cleaning fixation, lives alone. Though she is probably somewhere past eighty years old like the panting lady, Paola is full of chutzpa. Each step she takes across her marble floor just above my head is bursting with vigor. Her house slippers start clomping with the weight of wooden clogs at around five-thirty a.m.. The ripping screech of her taparelle being opened comes soon after accompanied by the morning radio news, the scraping of broom bristles, and the hum of a washing machine's revolutions.

Last October when my mom came to Bologna for a month, she laid in bed in the darkness one morning and said to me – I had been awakened by Paola too – “Doesn’t that poor woman have anything else to do besides start cleaning everyday at six a.m.?” We both knew the unfortunate answer to that.

I’m guessing it’s a generational thing. From the baby-boomer women who are sixty -- my mom’s age -- and beyond to those who are my grandma's age, the female sex is tied to the identity of the casalinga, housewife. But here in Italy it's not the tidy June Cleaver version of the profession where the role of housewife becomes almost a fashionable function, it's more a kind of stranglehold that takes this occupation by the throat and gives it a name -- control. These women's houses are always immaculate and they make you wear strange sock-like slippers over your shoes so that you're literally skating atop the tiles when you come over to visit them. Glasses are taken away before you can finish drinking and tables are wiped off while you’re still sitting and sipping coffee. Dinner and lunch are served at the exact same time and if you show up late there’s no reheating. I guess there’s something to be said for these habitual standards -- they keep the family together at mealtime and old folks who keep moving generally live longer, but it’s an extreme approach I could never take. Is this pre-occupation and obsession with absolute perfection and order a throw back from the days of Mussolini? Maybe even Il Duce wouldn't take the blame.
Read more!

PAROLACCE! Warning: for adult readers only

April 25th, 2008

I hardly swear in English. After about the age of ten when my family moved house and I lost touch with the dirty-mouthed little boy who lived across the street, my interest in words that shock abated. However living in Italy has changed my indifference somewhat. Maybe because swear words in Italian aren’t meant to surprise, instead they are more compelling forms of personal expression that everyone uses in often humorous and very human contexts. Even politicians like Berlusconi freely expound profane language as a way of appearing more like everyday folk and less like aloof VIPs. In his case, it’s yet another form of propaganda for attracting voters. During a political speech in 2006 he was quoted for saying he has too much esteem for Italians to think they would be “coglioni” and vote against their own interests. Coglioni are the male genitalia for which the English translation is balls, but his words could easily be interpreted as, “I do not believe that Italians are assholes and will, therefore, vote for the left.” Sure Berlusconi is crude, but his supporters like it. They see him as a man who tells it like it is.

Take the famous Vaffanculo Day (V-day for short) that was held in Bologna’s Piazza Maggiore last September. Led by stand-up comedian and political activist Beppe Grillo. The event united fed-up Italian voters, fifty-thousand strong, who are tired of hosting a long-term, self-indulgent and lethargic government largely populated by old men who have outworn their stay, a number of whom include petty criminals and money launderers linked to the mob. Italians from all corners of the country gathered to sign petitions and holler “basta,” especially considering Italian government officials are the highest paid in Europe while citizens’ salaries are the lowest. And holler they did. Vaffanculo basically means “go screw yourself where the sun don’t shine.” I try to imagine such a revolutionary day in America. Would we call it, “Up yours day?” Such a slogan may appear on an individual banner, but the likelihood of the country with its Puritan roots rallying behind a headliner like that is just as likely as President Bush calling the democrats pricks during a nationally televised speech.


What do Italians on the street say about a day for cussing out politicians? A man from Torino writes in a political blog that the “parolacce,” or curse words, that Grillo uses are no different from what the average Italian would use while driving in traffic or while shopping at the supermarket. “Better curses than hypocrisy,” he concludes. Another blog hosts a woman from Rome who says it’s more important to speak the truth in whatever idiom than to worry about the appropriateness of it all. “Aren’t we already getting screwed as it is?” she laments. The biggest difference between the Italian and American cultures in this regard is that Italians don't often take these expressions personally. The fact is that “Vaffanculo” is such a common expression in Italy today that it can also be said jokingly between friends and will ten times out of ten get a laugh. “Che cazzo dici?” (what the hell are you saying? -- “cazzo” actually means penis) is another. It’s a kind of rough and tumble camaraderie that is particular to Italy since the same expressions translated into American English will usually only get you a slamming door on your backside or a slap in the face.

Sure, there are cutesy euphemisms that avoid the crass here too, but I’ve tried both – “cavolo,” which means cabbage, instead of “cazzo” -- and have found that substitute words attract no less attention than the bolder ones do. Using the right curse word in the perfect moment is pretty much the same as having told a hilarious joke. People love it. The most famous of a battery of vulgar Bolognese expressions is “socmel” (suck me) or just “soccia” (suck). This expression is used by all in Bologna, including transplants, and I’ve even heard my eighty-year old neighbor who is a lawyer use both on vital occasions and I crack up every time. Would my American grandfather, who had his own variety of colorful 1930s lingo, have spontaneously said, “Oh, suck me!” upon having forgotten something he was supposed to do or after stubbing his toe. Not a chance!

Though “socmel” (pronounced SOACH-MEL) is definitely a gem and on the top of my list, my favorite expressions are the ones that blaspheme using the emphatic name of the pig or swine for starters. “Porca madonna,” “porca miseria,” “porca puttana” are the most common and are straightforward. There is also “porca eva,” still blaming Eve for original sin, “porca troia,” much like “porca puttana,” and “porcata,” something you don't want to hear, see, or do. Don’t get these confused with “maiala,” another name for female pig, which is an erotic woman. “Maialina” is the diminutive and sweeter, though is still an attractive and sexy little woman.

People who use these expressions come from all walks of life and their children who adopt them at home and in the schoolyard are not sequestered into corners for punishment. The Italian teachers I’ve met are more than happy to share their personal favorites, both in standard Italian and in dialect. Among the various dialects there must be three hundred or more names for the male and female genitalia. Why do Italians love to curse so much? The answer might be the same as why Italians love fast cars, actresses with big breasts, and ripped soccer players, regardless of their IQs. The Corriera Della Sera columnist Beppe Severgnini says that, “what everyone else thinks of as virtues are Italians’ weaknesses” and that the ever important need to make a “bella figura” (a good show) is not the same as making a good impression. A gratifying gesture is more important than good behavior, which takes effort, too much after centuries of inhibition. Servignini calls this a “sophisticated exhibitionism” that has no need of approval. The author Leopardi claimed Italians make fun of everything because they respect nothing. Passion and humor are at the core of Italian society and, if those things might be considered irresponsible at times, Italians can always repent with a few Hail Marys and start again.

For more, check out this dictionary of Italian slang and swear words.
Read more!

Easter Day: Palazzo Poggi and San Giacomo

March 22, 2008

Today I went to the Palazzo Poggi museum and was struck by the silence there. It’s an hermetic space that carries one into two pasts, those of both the 16th century architecture and the 18th century objects within. I saw Galvani’s (as in galvanized) experiments with electricity on frogs and couldn’t help but think of Mary Shelley’s synthetically animated Frankenstein. In the next room was an important exhibit on early obstetrics that showed dozens of intricate wooden models of the womb as well as the outmoded tools used to extract a baby. These tools resembled large pliers or salad servers, which grab the fetus by the head and pull. The display was historically fascinating but also combined a disturbing element of the grotesque. Ditto for the wax nude sculptures of the male and female complete with real pubic hair glued on. These models were amusingly called “Adam and Eve.”

Outside the museum I enjoyed the quiet that one experiences in the center of any Italian city on special holidays. This weekend is Pasqua (Easter) and most locals go to their families for a celebratory meal. As a result the towns completely shut down. I took a quiet stroll from the Palazzo Poggi under the spacious porticoes where the first sunlight I had seen in weeks played and refracted from between rows of weather-worn columns. Moving slowly toward Piazza Maggiore I first dropped into one of the larger and more important Cathedrals along Via Zamboni. I had been to San Giacomo before, in the dark of winter when the whole place appeared drab in its dim chilliness. But today the sun shown in from the carefully positioned windows on high and cast a beam of golden light upon the gilded altar. What magnificence! I realized for the first time that the Cathedral is decorated not only with the usual somber paintings of a bleeding Christ suffering on the cross but also with magical trompe-l’oeil murals that permit walls to give way to enchanted landscapes seen through imaginary windows. Beside sculptures in plaster cast are painted ones whose depth rivals those that are three-dimensional. A chatty volunteer approached me and asked me if I was Italian. Had I seen the altar? I told her I was American but lived in Bologna and had been to the church before. She left me alone, seeing that I was more of a local than a tourist, then approached a couple with cameras swinging from their necks. Had they seen the divine altar, she asked.

In Piazza Maggiore all of Bologna who had not already packed up their cars and left the city limits sat in the last rays of afternoon sun. Many were seated at tables at overpriced outdoor cafes and even more sat on the ground around a group of musicians jamming in front of the main Basilica, San Pietro. I thought to sit myself, to stop and listen to the acoustic guitar player and his gypsy folk, but the sun was threatening to disappear from above the clock tower that was now chiming four. I chose to keep following the kilometers of medieval porticoes that seemed to call my name as they framed my journey toward home. Ah Bologna!
Read more!